Unofficial news and tips about Google

July 16, 2007

Google Custom Search Business Edition

Google launched a business edition of the Custom Search program that will allow small businesses to add powerful search features for their sites. Google offers the same benefits as in the consumer edition, but also technical support, customization of search results using an XML API and no ads. The service is not very cheap: $100 per year for websites of up to 5,000 web pages, and $500 per year for websites of up to 50,000 pages, but it's much cheaper than other similar services or Google Search Appliance, a hardware solution that creates a local index and lets you search the intranet as well. The most affordable search appliance from Google costs $1,995 for 50,000 web pages. Here are the prices for other hosted site search solutions (* means that the product lets you control the crawling frequency, ** means the search tool also indexes password-protected pages):

Because Google uses its index to deliver results for the custom search engine, it can't guarantee it will index a web site or a certain page. Most other products try to completely index the site and let you control how often they re-index the pages.

Google realized that the ad-supported model, that works very well for consumers, isn't an option for businesses, that want technical support, custom-tailored solutions and are willing to pay for this.